SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ENTERPRISE : Making a Dime on Street Crime : Graffiti Finds a Legit Niche--on Clothing

He once took spray-paint cans and made the city of Los Angeles his imagination’s canvas, but Ash Hudson has now turned a third-story Rampart Boulevard loft into a studio where L.A.’s biggest vandalism problem is a business success story.

A former graffiti vandal--or tagger, in the vernacular of the streets--Hudson turned entrepreneur in 1989 by founding a firm called Conart. He has turned it into a clothing distributor that designs graffiti images for T-shirts and caps and boasts of 1994 orders totaling $1 million.

Conart (convict and art) now employs half a dozen paint-can-wielding staff artists and provides free-lance work for others, helping to focus their creative energies into a lucrative business.

“We’re occupying so much of their time that they don’t have time to go out on the street,” said the 22-year-old Hudson, a native of Culver City.

Taggers have been dreaded and hunted in major cities since urban teens began vandalizing buildings, subways and freeways in the late 1970s. The term refers to the vandals’ tags, or personalized signatures, they attach to their handiwork around the city.

But out of this illegal pastime have sprung legitimate graffiti artists, claiming a niche in the contemporary art world as well as in the clothing industry.

Dozens of graffiti clothing companies have started in big cities throughout the country, particularly in Los Angeles and New York and mostly by former taggers, said Robert Christofaro, a graphic designer for In Fashion, a trade magazine in New York City. Many of the companies have found it hard to stay afloat.

“A lot of them can’t manage to stay open . . . it’s a hard marketplace,” Christofaro said.

But for many, graffiti has become an avenue to opportunity. The clothing designs have attracted a large following of young adults who grew up fascinated by the genre.

“All the people that are most successful in the graffiti scene have expanded but held on to their graffiti roots. . . . The whole thing is being innovative,” said Kelly Gravao, another ex-tagger, who now owns Third Rail, an alternative clothing company in Boyle Heights. Third Rail also began by selling graffiti designed T-shirts and caps, but has since expanded its clothing line.

Gravao, 26, was arrested on many occasions and even shot in the leg when he tagged “in the wrong neighborhood,” he said.

Third Rail has grown 300% in sales since it opened in 1990, not long after Conart, Gravao said. He has one retail clothing store, Crazy Life, and is about to open a second in Hollywood. He said his focus has shifted from graffiti to various other clothing designs, targeted at surfers, skateboarders and snowboard enthusiasts.

Conart, he said, is one of the survivors in the graffiti-clothing business, benefiting when many imitators fell by the wayside. Today it sells to 470 accounts at specialty stores across the United States and as far away as Japan, where graffiti designs have become very popular.

“In Japan they’re not doing Japanese letters, they’re doing American letter schemes,” Hudson said.

Conart does half of its business there, where its designs are sold out soon after they are sent out, he said. He has even heard of bootleg Conart T-shirts being sold around Tokyo.

“(Graffiti) has become a big thing now with rap. . . . In one week everything (in stores) is sold out,” said Ken Kitakaze, who has coordinated Conart’s distribution to at least 50 stores throughout Japan for the last four years.

Conart is “the original maker of the graffiti street-style T-shirt,” said Paul Takahashi, a buyer for Extra-Large, whose clothing stores in Hollywood and New York were among the first to carry Conart’s designs. The market was saturated with imitators as soon as Conart’s designs hit stores, he said.

“We carry Conart because we try to keep the more original stuff.”

Irma Zandl, president of Zandl Group, New York marketing-trend consultants, said that recently clothing targeted to young adults has been dull. In the clothing industry the time is right for visually exciting pieces, like the ones graffiti artists design, she said.

The T-shirt designs are colorful and mesmerizing, but at the same time they often touch on social issues--and take a controversial point of view.

One of Conart’s depicts a Ku Klux Klan member holding his infant son, who is also dressed in the white garb of the organization. At the bottom it says: “Future Police Officer.” Another shirt is a caricature of two black men, one holding a gun and the other waving a flag that says: “No Justice No Peace.”

Hudson, an African American whose dreadlocks dangle to his chest, didn’t expect any of this success. Big business snuck up on him and his “conartists,” as he calls them. It snowballed when he began selling graffiti designed T-shirts in front of high schools at age 16.

“(Conart) was a hobby turned business,” he said. “I saw the connection of putting the imagery on clothing.”

After doing one-of-a-kind designs, he realized it would be more profitable to reproduce one design and sell it. That message that attracted many of his colleagues, making them realize there are job opportunities where their artistic talents can be utilized.

“It opened a lot of graffiti artists’ eyes,” Hudson said.

Dante Ariola, another former tagger, who began Third Rail with Gravao, left that company and opened Pawn Shop Press, a Santa Monica graphics design company that also uses graffiti images.

“I became disillusioned with the clothing business,” he said.

Indeed, clothing has been a launching pad for other commercial forms of graffiti.

Ariola, a 24-year-old from New York City, said he lost interest in using graffiti on clothing after many companies started using the designs and the genre became trendy. Now he designs graffiti logos for music groups like Cypress Hill, and is also branching out to do art direction for music videos.

Conart is also expanding outside of its clothing line. Three comic books are in production and there are plans to do animation. “We want to see some of this stuff come to life and move off the walls,” Hudson said.

The company has also designed tour-shirts and album covers for musical groups such as A Tribe Called Quest, The Pharcyde and AC-DC, and has just completed an album cover for Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, who is working on his own solo album.

“Graffiti artists can do other things than graffiti,” said Pedro Balugo, 27, a conartist who has been with the company from its beginnings. He has also done art direction and managed his own graffiti art gallery.

Hudson said the ability of graffiti artists to manipulate lighting schemes in their designs without any artistic training is characteristic of the raw talent on city streets.

“You either have it or you don’t,” Balugo said.

Said Hudson: “The average Joe, when you say graffiti, thinks gangs. But there is a big difference between a tagger and a graffiti artist.”

The eight-room studio, which Hudson began renting last year, is decorated wall to wall with graffiti paintings. A backdrop of a rioting city partly consumed by flames is one of the aerosol masterpieces that inspire conartists as they work. This is where they create, to the loud beats of the rap music that bred the graffiti genre along with break-dancing in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Even the speakers on one of the stereos are covered with graffiti.

In one corner is a white and red sign that has obviously been taken from some official place on the street. It says: “No Graffiti, Vandalism is prohibited, Violators will be prosecuted.”